LTC 089-2004 GolfWorld Magazine Features Miami Beach Gold Club
CITY OF MIAMI BEACH
Office of the City Manager
Letter to Commission No. 089-2004
To:
Mayor David Dermer and
Members of the City Commission
Date: April 19, 2004
From:
Jorge M. Gonzalez ('... Or"
City Manager .. y-' !
/
(
GolfWorld MaQazimYFeatures Miami Beach Goft Club
Subiect:
GolfWorld has become the latest international golf magazine to promote and recommend
our beautiful, new Miami Beach Golf Club to its readers. GolfWorld Magazine is a weekly
publication of Golf Digest and enjoys a worldwide readership of 188,000. A reprint of the
January 23,2004 article, beginning on page 26 featuring a full two page photograph of the
1 ih hole of the Miami Beach Golf Club is attached.
Veteran golf writer Peter Finch opens and closes his 6-page review of Miami area golf
courses that "after some cosmetic surgery. . . are looking better than ever" with praise for our
course. Mr. Finch concludes his article by stating "Still, if you're going to play only one of
these courses, the Miami Beach GC is hard to beat. "
This and other national and international media focusing on the Miami Beach Golf Club
brings the course to the attention of hundreds of thousands of golfers who otherwise might
not know about us. They reflect the positive reception from the golfing community that
helps assure continued success for the club.
J~C~.JM.jm
Robert C. Middaugh, Assistant City Manager
Kevin Smith, Parks & Recreation Director
Julio Magrisso, Assistant Parks & Recreation Director
The Parks & Recreation Department.
Where "WOWI" is our standard.
c:
r.Q... fW'..
~
- ---.
Miami Beach
~...~..i11
qrrr
2003
CITY OF MIAMI BEACH
Office of the City Manager
Letter to Commission No. 089-2004
m
To:
Mayor David Dermer and
Members of the City Commission
Date: April 19, 2004
From:
Jorge M. Gonzalez O.~~!\--"'"
City Manager /' I J
!
J
GolfWorld MaaazineFeatures Miami Beach GoltC1ub
Subiect:
GolfWorld haS-become the latest international golf magazine to promote and recommend
our beautiful, new Miami Beach Golf Club to its readers. GolfWorld Magazine is a weekly
publication of Golf Digest and enjoys a worldwide readership of 188,000. A reprint of the
January 23,2004 article, beginning on pag"e 26 featuring a full two page photograph of the
17th hole of the Miami Beach Golf Club is attached.
Veteran golf writer Peter Finch opens and closes his 6-page review of Miami area golf
courses that "after some cosmetic surgery. .. are looking better than ever" with praise for our
course. Mr. Finch concludes his article by stating "Still, if you're going to play only one of
these courses, the Miami Beach GC is hard to beat. "
This and other national and international media focusing on the Miami Beach Golf Club
brings the course to the attention of hundreds of thousands of golfers who otherwise might
not know about us. They reflect the positive reception from the golfing community that
helps assure continued success for the club.
J~~~:JM:jm
c: Robert C. Middaugh, Assistant City Manager
Kevin Smith, Parks & Recreation Director
Julio Magrisso, Assistant Parks & Recreation Director
The Parks & Recreation Department.
Where "WOW!" is our standard.
""
l.I
THE GAME,:S #1 NEWSWEEKL'(/AGOLfDIGEST ,Pl.ll~AnoN e JANUARY 2
"'~ ;&l m!:~,o"..' ,'/Ii;' "'
Q ~
ANTHONY MANDATTA CHOOSES HIS WORDS CAREFULL~ NOT WANTING TO OFFEND.
Basically what he's trying to say is this: Until last year, the golf course where he works just wasn't. .. well, it
wasn't good. ((It was a lower-end, very affordable course:' explains Mandatta, its new director of golf. "The
routing was challenging, but it lacked conditioning:'.
Ian Kemp, a transplanted Englishman who
lives nearby and plays the course most
weekends, has no need to be so careful with
his commentary. "This course was awful;'
he observes from the first tee one recent
morning. "It wascrapJ"
Both are talking about the Miami
Beach GC, a 6,813-yard, par-72 golf
course sitting right in the center of town.
Formerly known as Bayshore GC, this
one-time ugly duckling got a $10 mil-
lion overhaul in 2001 and 2002. The
new design was drawn up by Arthur
Hills/Steve Forrest and Associates, which
has done renovation work on the
Inverness Club, among many others.
Hills and his team kept the course's
routing essentially the same but scraped
away pretty much everything else and started
over again. They elevated all the tees and greens,
added undulation to its flat fairways, dug a hand-
ful of new bunkers, expanded its nine lakes so they're much more
in play and covered all 128 acres with a carpet of seashore pas-
I palum, an eco-friendly turf that can handle recycled water and
even seawater.
When the rechristened Miami Beach GC opened for business a
year ago, locals hardly could believe what they saw. "It's an entirely
different course;' says Kemp. "It's so much better than it was, words
can't even describe if'
Lots of Miami golfers are feeling the same way these days. Though
the area doesn't have any brand-new public-access courses to boast
about, no small number of its existing
resort and daily-fee facilities have under-
gone multimillion-dollar makeovers
lately. Johnny LaPonzina, whose
w Professional Course Management owns
~ and operates 14 courses in the area, fig-
~ ures at least 15 local tracks have been
8 remade in the past five years. "You have to
g keep up;' he says. "And those that have bit
~ the bullet, spent the money and done [a
~ renovation] are really benefiting from if'
~ Now, nobody's confusing Miami
~ with a golf destination like Pebble Beach
~ or Pinehurst. But all this reconstruction
8 does raise the question: Can you go
g there for all the many reasons people
~ visit Miami-sunny beaches, nightlife,
~ fine dining, the arts-and squeeze in a
~ few high-quality rounds of golf as well?
~ I decided to find out.
~ Miami's most famous golf spot, the
~ Doral Golf Resort and Spa, has spent
28 January 23, 2004 GolfWortd
$75 million on make overs over the past four years. Its
most recent project was the old nine-hole White
Course, which Greg Norman made into the Great
White, a 7,171-yard par 72. Built at a cost of$12 mil-
lion, it opened in February 2000.
But if you go to Miami and confine your golf to
Doral-as, I confess, I have done in the past-you
are missing out. On my latest trip to the area, timed
to coincide with a December blizzard that socked the
Northeast, I played five other remade courses, start-
ing with the Diplomat CC & Spa in Hollywood, Fla.,
and winding up at the Miami Beach GC a mere 22
miles down I -95.
Not ,all of them are great, not all of them are bril-
liant. But none of them, I'm happy to report, is crap.
"JACKIE GLEASON PLAYED HERE ALL THE
time in the old days;' says Tom Donahue, director of
golf at the Diplomat. (By the way, this is the unofficial
motto of every South Florida golf course. Gleason played
them all~and they will never let you forget it.) 'i\nd Cary
Middlecoff was the original head pro. But it was very short, not really
a championship course. The average par 4 was only 320 yards:'
That, combined with the fact that its beachfront hotel spent
most of the 1980s in deep financial trouble, left the resort out of
favor and in a state of grim disrepair by the 1990s. "From what I
understand the green fee was $10, and even that seemed kind of
steep;' says Donahue.
An unlikely group came to the rescue. In 1997 the Plumbers and
Pipe Fitters National Pension Fund stepped in, buying control of
the resort and eventually earmarking $82 million to build a new
golf course on the site. The late Joe Lee-architect of
seven PGA Tour stops last ye~r, among hundreds of
others-was hired to design it.
There's been no small amount of controversy
over the Plumbers and Pipe Fitters' ownership.
Dismayed by huge. cost overruns and allegations of
financial mismanagement, in 2002 the Department
of Labor wound up suing the pension fund's
trustees. The suit, filed in Fort Lauderdale federal
court, is scheduled to go to trial in May.
But to golfers, the important thing is this: Lee's
reimagined Diplomat, which opened in early 2000, is
a delight. Beautiful old banyan trees and royal palms
dot the fairways, and water is everywhere. Ponds
guard half the greens, and water comes into play, one
way or another, on 13 holes. The second hole, 'the
No. 1 handicap, is a 385-yard par 4 with an island
green. On my visit the course is in excellent shape,
the result of an additional bunkers-and-landscaping
facelift just last year.
I am staying at the rebuilt Diplomat Hotel, an
$800 million megacomplex about a mile away
from the course. It is perfectly nice and modern,
and my room features a panoram-
ic view of the Atlantic. The way the
room is set up, you can even see
the ocean from the bathtub. But it
is not cozy. If you're looking for
cozy, check out the accommoda-
tions over at the golf course. This
stately Mediterranean-style build-
ing has only 60 guest rooms and has .
a quieter, more soothing air than the
main towers. This is also where the
Diplomat's new, 30,000-square-foot
spa is located. The golfer I'm paired
with, a radio executive from Texas,
likes it so much he always stays here on business
trips, even when all his meetings are 20 miles away in
downtown Miami.
The qub at Emerald Hills, also in Hollywood
and just a lO-minute drive from the Diplomat, is
where I play my afternoon round. Originally a
Robert von Hagge-Bruce Devlin design, it was
reworked by architect Charles Ankrom and owner
Michael Feinberg in the late 1980s. It closed again
for the, summer of 2000 so Feinberg could remake
all 18 greens and a few tee boxes, at a cost of about
$1.2 million.
The new greens were seeded with low-growing
TifEagle Bermuda and can be quite speedy for a
daily-fee course-typically around 10 or 11 on the
Stimpmeter. Many have steep inclines that will hap-
pily take your too-firmly-struck ball and fling it off
the putting surface. Some are Pinehurst-type crown
shapes while others have false fronts that will reject
anything but a great shot. "We have a little bit of
everything as far as roll-offs are concerned," says
director of golf Andy Michalak.
It's not just the greens that are difficult. The whole
course is plenty challenging, with some uncomfort-
ably tight fairways and water that comes into play on
10 holes. The course has hosted qualifying tourna-
ments for the Ford Championship at Doral for years,
and it will have a Honda Classic qualifier this year,
too. From the 7, 123-yard back tees, it carries a rating
of 75.7 and a slope of 142. ,
Much as the local pros like it, though, Emerald
Hills is not my favorite on this trip. With the excep-
tion of a couple of memorable holes, it's a fairly
straightforward layout that goes winding through a
pretty mundane neighborhood. No matter how
much you spend on renovating a course, there's just
not much you can do about the neighbors.
GolfWorId January 23, 2004 29